VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY, “the Harvard of the South,” last week took a bold, dramatic and highly praiseworthy step. Well, kinda.

Vandy announced the elimination of its athletic department. It will continue to compete in the Southeastern Conference, but under the direct supervision and control of the school’s administration.

The goal, Chancellor Gordon Gee declared, is to combat the “win-at-all-costs culture” that has been driving Division I athletics further from even the thinnest pretenses of social and academic advancement and closer to a culture of criminality.

Sounds great. It really does.

Yet the cynic in me tells us that Vandy is doing this only because it can, because it can afford to travel the high road without costing some folks, including the chancellor, their jobs.

Vandy, you see, is perennially at the bottom of the SEC heap in men’s basketball and football while its student-athletes are perennially the SEC’s most academically successful. The two – legitimate student-athletes and bad teams – are hardly mutually exclusive. They exist more in partnership, the firm of Cause & Effect.

So Vanderbilt can afford to strut its stuff, to lead with what it does best in the name of athletics, which is to educate its athletes. Last week’s announcement was like the nicest kid on the block – perhaps the only nice kid on the block – resolving to be nicer.

But what if Vandy had regularly been a major bowl-game participant and/or regularly made it to March’s Sweet 16? What if good tickets to Vandy football and men’s basketball games were tough gets, and the school’s givingest alums and wealthiest supporters were particularly proud of the those teams’ winning records, as opposed to, say, the players’ academic prowess?

Ya think Vanderbilt’s chancellor would be moved to eliminate the athletic department in order to better ensure academic, social and financial integrity?

Neither do I.

Had the same announcement been made by Florida State or Syracuse or Nebraska, then we’d have something here, something far more radical and far more hopeful.

Ralph Kiner, when he was the slugging star for the Pirates, had his request for a pay raise rejected on the grounds that, “We finished last with ya, we can finish last without ya.” To that same end, Vanderbilt can afford to lead with its integrity. In those other SEC standings, Vandy almost always finished last, anyway.

* Wednesday, in a short obituary we wrote about Sean Kimerling, the Channel 11 sportscaster who died Tuesday at the age of 37, we noted that Kimerling, unlike too many on-air people in the TV and radio business, never big-timed anyone.

By week’s end, a bunch of people had checked in to let us know that we didn’t know the half of it.

Post editor and golf writer Ralph Wimbish played golf with Kimerling, sharing a cart at a media outing, last June. Wimbish, on the 15th tee, discovered that his wedding ring, which he’d removed when applying sunscreen, was missing.

“Sean wanted to stop right there, forget the golf and go back and look for it,” Wimbish recalled. “I told him that we’d finish the round, then I’d go look. If it had been found, it had already been turned in, hopefully.”

But it wasn’t turned in.

“After the round, Sean could’ve joined the others for food and drinks or whatever else he wanted to do or had to do. But he insisted on helping me look for that ring,” Wimbish said. “We found it.”

David Oxfeld, currently with MSG Network, two years ago worked as a 21-year-old summer-hire production assistant – a gopher – on a Mets’ Channel 11 telecast that included Kimerling as the on-field reporter. The game was delayed by rain.

While Channel 11 aired a sit-com rerun, Kimerling would appear, every now and then, to give an update from in front of the Mets’ dugout. During one of those live shots, Oxfeld was instructed to hold an umbrella over Kimerling’s head.

“As he wrapped up his weather update from Shea,” Oxfeld wrote us via e-mail, “he had the [broadcast] truck pan away from the dugout using the center-field camera, showing me holding the umbrella.

“In concluding his report, he said, ‘Some are still getting wet out here at Shea. But not me. And not if you have friends to help you out, like my friend, David.’ “

Donations in Kimerling’s memory can be made to The Sean Kimerling Testicular Cancer Foundation, 29 Broadway, Suite 1412, New York, N.Y., 10006.